well, it's over...

my time in China and my beloved Harry Potter world... and both were great! now i'm sorta mourning the loss of both.

anyways, my 2nd week of camp was VERY different than the 1st. here's my "family:"

Billy, Valery (my translator), me, and Bean - my 2 kids were like night and day: he's a 20-yr-old college student and she's a 12-yr-old special needs child w/ a terribly burned face

actually, we spent most of our time Brady-bunch-style w/ Martina's family since her kids were from the same 2 orphanages. this is us at Tiananmen Square. looking at Martina in this pic makes me laugh out loud everytime! =)

our little one, Bean - BOY, was she a handful! willful and downright disobedient a lot of the time. she would fight us - wanting to do everything on her own terms, resisting us when it was time to move onto the next activity... and i wanted to say, "Don't you see how miserable you are? Don't you see if you just obeyed or let go of your own will how easy it would be? how much fun?" then it hit me how applicable this is in my own life, in my own willfulness against God... i was, like she is, an orphan.

and in my struggles w/ loving this child, i shed tears as i heard God rebuking, "Do you know HOW much i love her?" enough to die for her. unconditionally. she needed me to love her, needed me to let her test the boundaries of that love...and i failed time and time again. oh, how glad i am that God's love is so much bigger than mine.

here Bean is getting tickled by Steve, one of my teammates. ( you're probably thinking, "What kind of name is Bean?" i know, i should've come up w/ something better but it was the English translation of her Chinese name...)

and yet when she was engaged, her laughter and smiles were incredibly contagious. it lifted my heart and reminded me that she was created in the image of God, just like me.

and just as i've been given hope, i wanted to pass it onto my girls. looking at Bean w/ human eyes, it was impossible - with her burned face, her lack of education... and even worse w/ Lina (below) - who has no arms. what lies in the future for them? but the organization is called Bring Me Hope for a reason. we are meant to love them, to serve them, and to infuse them w/ hope - something they might not have ever had before. the kind of hope that can only come from seeing them thru God's eyes.

Lina decorating her Memory Book w/ her feet. She ate w/ her feet too - used chopsticks and everything!

while i'd love to say we saw an immediate change in Bean's temperament or saw the fruit of our labors, in the end it comes to this: whether or not we can SEE that we're making a difference, we need to find contentment in simply doing His will. And to paraphrase from Gary Haugen's book, God's will is that we love others as ourselves, that we remember those who are mistreated as if we ourselves were suffering - and if we were in their place, would we want to be forgotten?

so let's not forget them...let us shield and protect them and bring them hope.

Peter getting drenched while holding the umbrella over the girls.

anyone wanna come next year?

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And now, can i just add how much i miss Martina? i was so grateful for her presence on this trip - our nightly walks debriefing the day, her ridiculously fake merchandise purchases, and her wacky humor! it was both a blessing and a riot.

she hated taking "normal" pictures... this is her trying to push me into the pond

i think we were trying to beat up cinderella or something... always great to find a kindred spirit. =)